arcane

I consider this game 99% pretty easy and I will never use my email for more inspirations. Design a rare thing or two around incarnates and IO’s by all means please, but absolutely nothing should be designed around people that abuse tricks and temp powers etc if you ask me. Fuck that.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but I don’t think Scrappers should have taunt auras.

I have maybe 9 or so brutes. Only times besides my 5 /fire brutes that I picked a brute specifically because I thought it was my best option was for Regen and Energy Aura. In both cases I was wanting to play non-tank sets but play them like a tank. I would’ve played them as scrappers but I personally like melees to feel like brick walls so I just don’t have very many scrappers/stalkers (yet). I’ve made a lot of tankers since this debate first started to pop up in the forums and they’ve quickly become my favorite melee AT. So you could say I’ve come around to agreeing more with ole Bill than I used to. Helps that I’m a sucker for proc monsters.

I dunno. You could think of it the other way: resistance and defense gets exponentially better per 1% as you get more - when you look at it from the angle of how the enemy’s damage/accuracy adjusts with each 1%. And tankers often can use IO’s to cap quantities they never could before. Like non-S/L resistance on most resistance sets. Semantics, perhaps. Point is I’m not convinced Blasters need any help at all 😉

Depends how you use them but sure. I’d argue that the difference between IO potency between AT’s is negligible compared to the difference between an IO’d build vs. non-IO’d build for any given AT though. Also I would clarify that only 10-20% of my blasters are IO’d according to the soft cap meta. Because it’s not necessary. I’d rather load up on more damage and procs than sacrifice all my bonuses for something inspirations can handle fine. So, not sure I’m meeting this concept of patching holes with my IO’s.

Disagree on Radiation Blast needing help at all. Fantastic set. Agree on Assault Rifle and Sonic Blast.

Interested to try this 🙂

Of course I only play with IO’s, but I don’t buy the implication that blasters are underperforming in non-IO land. If I haven’t finished my IO’s on any given character, I just compensate with more inspirations. It’s never as if IO’s make an AT go from worst to best; they only amplify what’s already there.

I don’t actually want Fire Blast nerfed. I’m just saying that IF you were to try to bring equity to DPA, it would be less bad to nerf Fire than to make every other set monstrously OP too. Since I’d prefer not to nerfherd, my logical preference would be to leave the status quo and focus on actual underperformers.

Yeah, Blasters and Tankers are the two AT’s right now where I feel I could pretty much make any possibly powerset combination play like easymode.

Fire being extra OP is not a logical reason to buff everything else. It’s a logical reason to nerf Fire. That being said, since people like Fire, better to leave the issue alone than to highlight an issue that logically calls for a nerf. Blasters are OP in general right now and further buffs should be completely off the table beyond the bigtime duds. Ignite, Shout, etc.

I don’t think the DPA of one attack merits buffs. Balance is far more nuanced than that. Obviously more buffs to still-underperforming sets like Assault Rifle or Sonic Blast are welcome, but that’s about it. If you actually play other blasters instead of just reading data and fighting pylons, you’ll know that most of the sets in question - Rad, Water, Dark, Psy, Beam, etc. - are in great shape. Blasters in general are easily one of the top AT’s across the board. Even my AR/Dev outperforms more meta combinations from other AT’s. They simply need zero help at best (nerfs at worst) outside of the rare dud attack.

You don’t even have to set a pattern. You can ignore the mechanic entirely and the set would still be great because of Savage Leap.

My Rad/Savage tanker is easily one of my better tankers, so I would frankly recommend not worrying about the clunky mechanic since the set as a whole is kind of awesome.

Yeah I don't have a clue. I know I have seen one before where it felt inflated too. As for mine, I am inclined to think it can't be inflated THAT much because there's been a lot of AFK action powerleveling dozens of alts and 1,000 vet levels on that one. But yeah, I know I've checked once on a newish character and been told I already had like over a hundred hours or something that felt very wrong.

Just checked my most played.. 3,251 hours. Hey, do I win the thread?

My biggest curiosities here were (1) whether or not you were letting bosses melee with you or continually backing away from them (melee with a squishy is only to be done once you’re certain you can take the heat and then (2) your enhancements situation. And then were you using inspirations, using your self heal reactively, etc. Overall one of the biggest mistakes in MMO’s is indiscriminate button mashing where the veterans focus more on dodging, positioning, reactivity, etc.

I feel like we should start by bumping the damage modifier back down (0.85->0.75, right) since the AoE/radius buffs are quite popular and the lower modifier can still be worked around a bit with procs. Then re-crunch the numbers and see where that leaves us. It might still leave tankers ahead, but it seems like the most obvious incremental measure you could try.

If AoE immobilizes are making your kill speed unacceptable, you have other problems besides AoE immobilizes.

I’d rather lower tanker damage than mitigation.

The damage procs allow the Tankers to close the damage gap, which is not the same as surpassing brute damage. Lots of evidence has been provided that Tankers do almost as much damage as Brutes. Basically zero convincing evidence has been provided that they do more damage than Brutes. Bill’s argument still stands as a subjective reason you could potentially argue this is wrong, but saying Tankers actually surpass Brute damage is just misinformation as far as I am aware.

I’m not sure what exactly are your primary issues, but note every seasoned player in this game will tell you the same thing: this game does not have a dedicated “healer” role. Even on Empathy and Pain Domination, the team buffs are more important than the heals, and players that focus on”healing” and don’t lean into the buffer side of that role tend to wind up with gimpy characters. If you’re going to play either of those sets, you’re also going to get by far the best results by teaming. Are you teaming? That said, a pain corruptor should still be reasonably soloable if you are healing yourself, buffing yourself, kiting out of melee, popping break frees, etc. PM me if you want to team up in game and learn how to jump around, kite, pick out IO’s, etc. but that may frustrate you since I only play IO’d characters - so maybe someone with SO’d lowbies could offer the same.

This figure could prove immensely depressing for some of us.

But Burnout only affects primary/secondary right? Do I have that wrong?

Millennial here. I hope people only use Boomer as an insult ironically. Because otherwise, that would make one pretty stupid tbh.